[Python-Dev] buildin vs. shared modules

Tue Oct 21 12:26:13 EDT 2003

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:
[about making _socket a builtin module instead of an extension]
>> > Long ago, when I first set up the VC5 project, there were still some
>> > target systems out there that didn't have a working winsock DLL, and
>> > "import socket" or "import select" would fail there for that reason.
>> > If this is no longer a problem, I'm +1 on this.
>>>> Not on the sytems that I work on. To be double sure, _socket could be
>> rewritten to load the winsock dll dynamically. And maybe this becomes
>> an issue again if IPv6 is compiled in.
>> I'd rather not have more Windows-specific cruft in the socket and
> select module source code -- they are bad enough already. Dynamically
> loading winsock probably would mean that ever call into it has to be
> coded differently, right?

Yes.
Yet another approach would be to use the delay_load feature of MSVC, it
allows dynamic loading of the dlls at runtime, ideally without changing
the source code.
So far I have never tried that, does anyone know if this really works?
Thomas